Origin Story Part One
In which I try to explain myself—and fail
Driving home from Third Wheel Comedy one evening I passed an unexpected water fountain at the intersection of Chevy Chase and San Fernando in Glendale, just over the border from Los Angeles. I say “unexpected” because for a drought-stricken region like Southern California, there’s so much conspicuous water waste here that I’ve gotten used to such spillage.
But it’s one thing for your neighbors’ sprinklers to erupt after a downpour, as happened throughout the atmospheric-river cycle of the holidays. It’s quite another to be cruising down the road and spot Old Faithful at a major crossroads in the middle of the night.
At the time I assumed the gusher was deliberate, the result of a decision by the authorities on the scene. Only later did it occur to me that the spray could’ve been an accident—the consequence of a burst fire hydrant or some other neutral event.
Either way, the sight surprised me so that I did a U-turn and got out to document it. I thought anew of the movie Nightcrawler—the 2014 Jake Gyllenhaal starrer about a self-made tabloid-TV producer tracking graveyard-shift mayhem—but there was nothing unseemly to capture: just some errant H20. I posted the video to my YouTube channel by force of habit and then deleted it a few days later after it only accumulated a few views.
Such is labor in the creator economy, where you never know what’ll stick until it sticks—the “Throw spaghetti at the wall” philosophy that none other than Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner has quoted regarding her family’s initial efforts to find an audience through legacy and social media alike.
“We’ve kissed a lot of frogs,” Jenner told the New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin in November 2019 (at 9:32), emphasizing that “trial and error” (from 8:46) was the Kardashians’ main strategy for success.
I too have kissed a lot of frogs—mainly my shadow selves and impostors—on my journey through the creator economy, where the more content you create, the more engagement you attract. Turns out the type—or quality—of content doesn’t matter so long as you produce it consistently—because consumer demand is ever present (and consumers hardly produce their own content anymore).
This productivity racket obviously benefits Big Tech. But it’s not horrible for performers honing their chops or exploring new paths, whether online or off.
As just such a performer—a former journalist and academic who leaned into the massive change of the pandemic to redirect my life trajectory—social media has been a game changer. Streaming video in particular let me become comfortable on camera while building the skills necessary to work as a professional stage and screen actor, and without having to leave my apartment.
By the time I arrived in Hollywood in the fall of 2021 after a year of clowning around on YouTube and Instagram, acting in legacy entertainment media no longer seemed far-fetched—especially when the friends who hosted me in those early days advised me to sign up with Central Casting, the go-to agency for film and TV extras.
Seventeen months later, I’ve worked on enough productions—to say nothing of my ongoing incubation at the Improv—to confirm that the entertainment industry is my professional forever home: the last stop for a repressed theater kid who’s finally bloomed.
But while this public journal will cover my third career act as an entertainer, it’ll also detail the many stories, ideas, influences, and experiences that have led me to this role.
I’ve touched on much of this material on my Twitter over the last three years. Though I’m no longer posting new writing there—that’s what this “newsletter” is for—my account remains open as the public archive I consciously intended it to be in the aftermath of filing my dissertation on May 13th, 2020.
It was then my life seemed to flip and get turned upside down: my boyfriend Arthur deciding to move out of our Flatbush apartment, causing our break-up; my leaving the city, where I’d lived for the previous 20 years, for cheaper Philly; and then a series of smaller incidents until the twin peaks of late summer: a standoff with Gettysburg College over threats to campus safety; and—a hundred-and-thirty-seven miles away in the so-called City of Brotherly Love—my parents showing up at my new crib for an intervention with a psychiatric crisis team from Einstein Healthcare Network in tow.
Like my employer and other confused parties that horrible season—fifty-three years after the Summer of Love—my folks thought I was undergoing a mental-health emergency of some sort because I didn’t want to teach in person at an institution that had quarantined its students in their dorms.
I told Pat and John to stand down. They did. For a spell.
Throughout this comedy of errors—inlaid in a plague of biblical scope—I observed three cues: (1) have fun; (2) experiment; and (3) ride the wave. Together they kept me alive.
This scroll—The Book of Sean M. P.—is a chronicle of a rebirth foretold ever since my casting at Andy Warhol’s magazine Interview at age 22, way back in the year 2000.
I’m now 45. You do the math.
Throughout this comedy of errors—inlaid in a plague of biblical scope—I observed three cues: (1) have fun; (2) experiment; and (3) ride the wave. Together they kept me alive. This scroll—The Book of Sean M. P.—is a chronicle of a rebirth foretold ever since my casting at Andy Warhol’s magazine Interview at age 22, way back in the year 2000. You do the math.
Carrie Fisher once told Dave Letterman that she’d nearly completed writing a book but was still “noodling around” with it—a phrase that’s stayed with me for its concise description of my own tendency to draw out a piece of writing by overly tinkering with it. (I also love noodles—of any variety!)
In my memory, Fisher disclosed this bit of shop talk to Letterman on his CBS program in the 2000s or 2010s—my mind returns to an image of me, as an adult, viewing the conversation in the great room of one of my parents’ homes.
But when I searched online, I discovered she made the remark on Dave’s original NBC show on December 13th, 1988, when I—ten years old—most definitely wasn’t watching.
Could be that “noodling around” was a catch phrase for the beloved star—maybe she used it another time with Dave on an episode I did see, before her premature death at age 60 in 2016. Or perhaps I caught a rerun. Who knows?
Regardless, what stands out to me more is my total forgetting of what manuscript Fisher was referring to: not a book at all but the screenplay adaptation of her bestselling 1987 novel Postcards from the Edge—one of my favorite intellectual properties and guiding lights. I’d blanked on the larger context of her memorable words for years.
Funny how the brain plays tricks like that.
Funny how the key is lost—and how it’s found.
Ciao for now,
Sean M. P.
